How Campari Group Leverages Cloud4Wi to Create Engaging Brand Experiences Through WiFi

Headquartered in Sesto San Giovanni, Italy, Campari Group is a major player in the global spirits industry, with a portfolio of over 50 premium and super premium brands.
The Group was founded in 1860 and today is the sixth-largest player worldwide in the premium spirits industry. It has a global distribution reach, trading in over 190 nations around the world with leading positions in Europe and the Americas.

At a time when third-party cookies are being phased out, and campaigns that rely on third-party databases for mass targeting are on the brink of obsolescence, Campari Group understood that a first-party data approach was the only way to craft personalized experiences. To achieve their goal, the company decided to collect consumer data at diverse events and create a comprehensive 360-degree view of their consumers. This would include using multiple sources to support the entire consumer journey across all touchpoints, both online and face-to-face, creating real-time moments that build long-lasting consumer relationships.

For this, Campari Group turned to WiFi as a complimentary offer to their consumers visiting its Brand Houses and office locations. The company needed an enterprise WiFi platform that could onboard consumers seamlessly, distinguish new consumers from existing ones, and also collect data from bartenders depending on the nature of the event. How this WiFi platform integrated with its current martech stack would be crucial in every aspect of the company’s consumer omnichannel experience.

To revamp their existing WiFi initiative, Campari Group looked for a platform that would not only support branded WiFi services leveraging their Cisco Meraki infrastructure, but also gather consumer location data while maintaining privacy on a global scale.

Through consulting with market-research firm Gartner, engaging with Cisco Meraki, and seeking insights from other prominent retailers like Valentino, a clear frontrunner emerged: Cloud4Wi. Campari Group strategically selected Cloud4Wi as its technology partner — a decision that proved a masterstroke, as Cloud4Wi seamlessly aligned with Campari Group’s multifaceted requirements, from both the IT and marketing teams’ perspectives. Campari began deploying Cloud4Wi in December 2018, when it quickly became apparent that rolling out WiFi across more than 51 locations was far less complicated than anticipated.

Cloud4Wi made it easy to create beautiful, branded captive portals for Campari’s offices and Brand Houses — including Camparino and Galleria Campari in Milan, Appleton in Jamaica, Forty Creek in Canada, and Terrazza Aperol in Venice. The portals were customized in visual identity, style, and language, and — crucially — tailored in terms of policies (privacy, terms of use, marketing, and profiling). Consumers had multiple login options, including social, email, and phone number. Those who signed in had to verify their age in accordance with local data-protection and legal-drinking-age regulations, which vary by location — for instance, in the USA only consumers aged 21+ were permitted to subscribe to Campari’s newsletter and marketing communications.

Using Cloud4Wi, Campari Group could also send an enticing email upon a consumer’s departure, asking for valuable feedback on the on-premises experience. Offering WiFi paved the way for Campari to know who consumers are, how they discover the on-premises experience, and how they interact with locations — including venues visited, visit dates, and average dwell time.

Thanks to Cloud4Wi’s easy integration, all consumer data is fed into Campari Group’s Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Insights platform — enabling a true 360-degree consumer view by also leveraging: AnyRoad (consumer data and bookings for live experiences and events), Constant Contact (email marketing and contact profiles), Sprinklr (social-media monitoring and search profiles), and Splash (event marketing).

Thanks to its partnership with Cloud4Wi, Campari Group is now able to collect actionable consumer location data, all synced seamlessly with the company’s CDP. Here are the main KPIs:

• Active locations: 55
• New contacts in the last three months: 9,7K+

This is only the beginning for Campari Group, as the company plans to roll out Cloud4Wi across more locations including the “light houses” – those are the locations of key local partners where consumers can live the quintessential experience of our brands.

Campari Group has also a plan to streamline the WiFi access. This is why they are launching a pilot project to leverage Wi-Fi CERTIFIED Passpoint and enable onboarding through a QR code. Passpoint will create an automatic, secure, and portal-free WiFi experience to consumers on their arrival, making data collection even more seamless.

The company finally plans to unlock the true potential of location-based marketing, delivering hyper-personalized consumer journeys that can outperform even the most carefully curated digital marketing. By feeding consumer location data into the company’s Microsoft Dynamics 365 Marketing, Campari Group will be able to send personalized messages at the right time and place to consenting consumers based on their real-time actions at key locations.